Heleen Pott is Socrates Professor of Arts & Culture in the
Department of History & Arts and in the Department of
Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
She studied philosophy, sociology and literature at the University of
Amsterdam. After her doctoral studies (graduation UvA 1985 cum laude)
she worked as a NWO researcher at the Department of Philosophy UvA
(1987-1992), where she wrote a dissertation on the ‘cognitive turn'
that took place during the 1970s and 1980's in interdisciplinary
emotion research (UvA 1992 cum laude; supervisors Theo de Boer and Nico
Frijda). From 1992 on, she has been Assistant Professor (0,7) at the
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. In 1999,
she was appointed (special) Professor of Arts & Culture at the
Erasmus University Rotterdam (0,2 bijzonder hoogleraar).
She published books and articles on a broad spectrum of topics, ranging
from the philosophy of emotions through American pragmatism (William
James, Richard Rorty) & postkantian naturalism (Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche) to matters of literature, art, politics and cultural
hermeneutics. She also contributed reviews and articles to newspapers
and magazines.
During her career she served on the editorial board of several
journals, including het Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor
Wijsbegeerte, Krisis, en Filosofie
& Praktijk. Outside academia, she was a member of
the Board of the Dutch Humanistic Association, het Humanistisch Verbond
(2005-2008).
In 2000 she was Visiting Professor at the Emotion Centre/University of
Haifa (NWO travel grant). In 2007-2008 she was a fellow at the NIAS in
Wassenaar. In 2009 she was a Visiting Professor at the Charles
University Prague.
Her main research interests are ïn the history and philosophy of
emotion theories; post-Kantian naturalism; trauma and cultural memory

Research Project 1
Heleen Pott
Rethinking emotions - Affect and Cognition in the
History of Science and Philosophy
Emotions are a hot topic today. They are deemed crucial to the
understanding of practical reasoning and decision making, the
experience of art, the evolution of consciousness, and many other
things. Without emotion, there would be no literature, no morality, no
politics, no cultural memory or public life, just nothing but boring
routine.
Surprisingly however, during the first half of the 20th century,
scientists tended to neglect and ignore emotional phenomena. It was
only since the late 1960s that the ‘emotions' as a psychological
category started to become a fashionable area of scientific research.
In the history of philosophy, emotions were not very popular either. A
strong current of Western thought systematically warned against intense
anger, joy, fear or grief, and called for banishing the ‘passions' as
alien powers that act against our rational will.
Rethinking emotions critically examines how, over
the past 40 years, emotions became an increasingly popular subject
matter in cognitive psychology, the humanities and neuroscience. The
project examines current disagreements between cognitive and
non-cognitive definitions of ‘emotion' and styles of emotion research.
It also raises philosophical questions about the recently proclaimed
‘rational' nature of emotions, about how the concept of ‘emotion'
differs from ‘passion' and ‘affect', and how it relates to concerns and
values, rationality and cognition, bodily changes and affective
intentionality.
Its major theoretical claim is that a re-thinking of contemporary
psychological approaches of feelings and emotions in the context of
historical theories of the passions (Aristotle, Stoa, Aquinas,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein,
Ricoeur and Plessner) can go beyond the tired dichotomies of affect and
cognition, body and mind, causality and rationality, and make a major
contribution to a truly integrative conceptual framework for
understanding emotions.

Research Project 2
Heleen Pott
The Return of William James. Rediscovering the Body in
Emotion, Cognition and Rationality
Over the past ten years, neuroscientific interest in the emotions has
virtually exploded. A growing network of researchers now claim that
emotions are adaptive neurobiological programs in the mammalian brain,
affective responses that are constituted by unique physiological
profiles. In an explicit criticism of cognition-based emotion theories,
Damasio (1994, 1999, 2003), LeDoux (1998) and others situate their work
in the tradition of William James' body-based feeling theory again.
The proposed research will reinterpret James' ‘feelings of bodily
changes' in the broader context of his philosophical pragmatism and
argue that at the foundation of his theory lies an interest which still
goes unnoticed. In his notorious article ‘What is an Emotion?' (Mind
1884), as elsewhere (1892, 1894, 1897), and notably in The
Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James attempted to
integrate findings from Darwinian biology with the use of the
phenomenological method (not to be confused with simple introspection),
in order to work out a new conceptualization of emotion as a central
organizing process for both consciousness and behavior. This double
focus remains highly relevant for future multidisciplinary emotion
research. I will show that a critical reexamination of James' theory
helps clarify some fundamental puzzles in contemporary emotion theory
and research. Central questions to be explored include: How can the
intentionality of emotions be naturalized? What do (neuro)biological
affect theories imply with respect to rationality, action and human
responsibility? What do the brief, irruptive, causally triggered
responses that last for 120 milliseconds such as are presented in the
work of LeDoux c.s., have to do with the longer-term personal passions
of Antigone, Othello, or Swann, that are so vividly described in
literature?